Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Book Image

Secret Recipes of the Python Ninja

Overview of this book

This book covers the unexplored secrets of Python, delve into its depths, and uncover its mysteries. You’ll unearth secrets related to the implementation of the standard library, by looking at how modules actually work. You’ll understand the implementation of collections, decimals, and fraction modules. If you haven’t used decorators, coroutines, and generator functions much before, as you make your way through the recipes, you’ll learn what you’ve been missing out on. We’ll cover internal special methods in detail, so you understand what they are and how they can be used to improve the engineering decisions you make. Next, you’ll explore the CPython interpreter, which is a treasure trove of secret hacks that not many programmers are aware of. We’ll take you through the depths of the PyPy project, where you’ll come across several exciting ways that you can improve speed and concurrency. Finally, we’ll take time to explore the PEPs of the latest versions to discover some interesting hacks.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Title Page
Copyright and Credits
Packt Upsell
Foreword
Contributors
Preface
Index

Inline comments and the dir command


The simplest and most common way to document code is to simply add comments while writing the code. This can range from simple TODO reminders for the developers, to an explanation of why the developer coded something in a particular way.

As seen previously, comments in Python code start with a hash mark, #, and continue to the end of the line. Multi-line comments can be made by adding a hash mark at the beginning of each line, or triple quotation marks can be used instead. Keep in mind, though, that certain tools don't know about triple-quoted comments, so it's better to use them sparingly.

The problem with in-line comments is that they can only be seen if you are actively looking at the code. While we will discuss ways to access in-code comments, these basic one-liners are not actively culled by documentation parsers.

If, however, you want to see what functions a module provides to the developer, using the dir() function is one easy way of doing that. The...